What was distinctive about Islamic law in the early modern period, the Muslim world's age of empire? How did Islamic law connect with the imperial power wielded by the great Turco-Persian dynasts, cultural descendants of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, who ruled the vast swathe of Eurasia and north Africa from Algiers to Calcutta? This book explores this question through a study of legal practices in Cairo during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Cairo was a long way from the Ottoman Empire's heartlands, but was one of its most important cities: the second largest in the empire after Istanbul, and the key to Egypt, the empire's most lucrative province. Moreover, the very contrast between the centrality of Cairo within Islamic history and its provinciality during the Ottoman period symbolizes one of the key dynamics animating Ottoman legal history. How did a dynasty from the far frontier of the Muslim world manage to harness the sharīca to imperial ends, in the very cities where that prestigious legal tradition was born and cultivated?

The book is centered around two interconnected lines of inquiry, which engage with important themes in Islamic legal studies and Ottoman historiography. The first is the relationship between Islamic law and political authority: what was the place of the Sultan and his government in what is often seen as a quintessential jurists’ law? I argue that central and local political authorities were intimately involved in the formulation of legal doctrine and the day-to-day provision of justice. In contrast to prevailing models of Islamic legal history, I show that institutions resembling the ruler's maḥālim tribunal survived beyond the Middle Ages and throughout the Ottoman period, and that government intervention in Egypt's legal system began long before Meḥmed cAlī's reforms of the nineteenth century.

The second line of inquiry is the imperial relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman center: what sustained Ottoman rule over this distant province during a period in which most historians describe a shift in power from the government in Istanbul to provincial political forces? I demonstrate that law and legal practice were central to this relationship, as government edicts shaped Egypt's laws and the Grand Vizier, the Ottoman governor and military officers handled lawsuits and disputes originating in Egypt.